I’m a Pitchf/x moron, but it strikes me that while its highest and best use is probably inside a baseball’s front office to analyze players and stuff, this kind of snooping is its best use for fans. Maybe it’s me, but I tend to glaze over when I read a general “Let’s look at Player X’s outing via Pitchf/x” article. When there’s a very specific question directing things, however, even my feeble mind closely follows and greatly appreciates the analysis.

I too have a terrible time with the pitch f/x stuff. They use regularly on RAB and though I see that the data it produces is valuable, I have the hardest time understanding what the heck it is showing. It seems like the way of the future for analyzing pitchers/at bats. Maybe I should have taken a few more math classes and a few less social history courses in college!

The only legitimate complaint would be from the pitcher’s side. There seem to be AT LEAST as many grey dots IN the boxes as there are black dots OUTSIDE the boxes. Unless we want to go to all-electronic ball and strike calling, SHUT UO, MILTON! There’s a reason that the solid hitter is no longer a Ranger, and I suspect that being a nut job might be it……

If you read the body of the article and the discussion of the regression analysis you can clearly see that there is no statistical difference in size of strike zones. the different locations of the strike contours is almost certainly due to chance, it is however a possible piece of evidence against the notion that strike zones are consistent across umpires or even for the same ump.

on RAB they usually use f/x graphs to chart pitchers release points and and pitch movement to look for variations that might be useful in analyzing a pitcher’s performance. they did this with wang earlier this season when he was struggling so badly to show how his release point had changed and was less over the top and how last night he was back where he should be, albeit for only a couple of innings.